Humour and Knowledge in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”

Abstract

The present study intends to look at the ways in which humour enacts modes of knowledge and self-expression in Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” (1921). The story revolves around two spinsterly sisters who have spent most of their lives tending to their tyrannical father and now find themselves at a loss when they are finally free of him. The narrative is both sympathetic and merciless towards the sisters’ fumbling attempts at independence, but the women are often in on the joke; humour is both a “black dressing-gown” which envelops the sisters and renders them objects of ridicule, but it is also a way out, offering a subversive counterpoint to the voice of the Father, as the sisters imagine the patriarch in very comical and undignified positions, while perceiving themselves as outsiders, “creeping off…like black cats”. Though the short story has often been read in terms of hopelessness and despair by Rhoda B. Nathan and Gerri Kimber, this paper wishes to show how humour modulates and moderates this hopelessness, allowing for the two single women to assert their personality within the stifling society of their time. The ridiculous, in this case, does not need to be a death sentence, but rather a form of knowledge and resistance: the spinsters are aware of the absurdity of their condition and the futility of their place in the modern world and choose comedy over tragedy.